“And the politician?”
“That brings in people who don’t like scrutiny.” His voice stays even, but the tension in him doesn’t.
Later, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. My body refuses to settle, not because I’m afraid, but because I’m furious, and because fury is easier to hold than helplessness.
I roll onto my side and rest my palm on my stomach, and I don’t pretend I know exactly what I’m feeling yet, but the awareness of it is there, and it makes my throat tighten anyway.
“You’re not going to grow up afraid of these people,” I whisper. “Not while I’m here.”
Ethan comes out of the bathroom and crouches in front of me, then presses his forehead lightly to my belly and breathes once like he needs the reminder that this is real and solid.
“She’s going to make a move,” he says quietly.
“She’s going to make a mistake,” I reply.
He looks up at me, eyes steady, and I can see the restraint in him, because he wants to do everything himself and he’s forcing himself not to.
I reach down and touch his cheek, then keep it simple. “Let’s finish this.”
24
ETHAN
Victoria cancels three meetings before nine, she reroutes two calls through assistants who don’t exist on any org chart, and she blocks her calendar with “travel” even though Harrison’s investigator can’t find a single outbound flight tied to her legal name or her known aliases in the last six months.
She reorganizes, because she believes she can always outlast consequences.
I’m in my office before seven, and my coffee sits untouched while three screens stay open in front of me, one for legal, one for compliance, and one for Harrison’s live notes as his team tracks her communications in real time under warrants and consents we already secured.
The board call is set for nine, and I’ve kept it quiet on purpose, because the fewer people who know the timing, the fewer people can warn her.
I open the first folder again, not because I need the reminder, but because I want every line in my head before I say her nameout loud in a room full of people who used to treat her like a genius.
Lane Strategies.
Langford Consulting.
Two shells out of the Caymans, one out of Malta, and one nonprofit whose board “meetings” were calendar invites nobody ever attended.
A stack of invoices that match her formatting habits, right down to the spacing errors she never fixed, because she liked seeing her fingerprints on the work.
The final page is the one that matters most, and it’s the reason this ends clean.
A signed affidavit.
A chain of authorization.
A public official’s name that forces federal interest, because nobody wants the optics of ignoring it.
My phone buzzes.
Harrison: She’s calling D.C. again. Same burner. Same routing.
Me: Keep logging it. No contact.
I don’t want a warning, I want a record.
At eight-thirty, I walk down the hall to the boardroom. I don’t bring a parade with me, because I’m not trying to win a scene.
